Electronics, Linux

More Phone Hacking Fun

With Google’s just announced Open Handset Alliance, I figure the chances of getting a phone that’s possible to hack and improve just suddenly increased a lot!Open Handset Alliance

Android is a project by the alliance, claimed to be an open source, Linux-based, platform for core and applications for mobile phones – “a complete mobile phone software stack”. They promise an “early look” of the SDK on November 12, so I figure that can be interesting. The SDK is supposed to be a free download and will contain all the docs. It could potentially mean some fun coming up soon!

It is cool to see both Samsung and Motorola from the handset world joining the band wagon, and also interesting and not the least surprising to see that Sony Ericsson and Nokia aren’t there…

Rockbox

Rockbox Downloads Oct 2007

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Rockbox!

I did a count back in August, and it seems the downloads counter is growing. During October 2007, Rockbox was downloaded 102127 times from build.rockbox.org, split up on 26 different zip files. This is a 43% increase since my last count! (New since last count is the SanDisk Sansa C200 package)

Here’s the list, with the August results on the right side of the slash (position, count, share of total).

  1. ipodvideo 20721 (20.3%) / #1 17829 (25.1%)
  2. sansae200 18788 (18.4%) / #2 9909 (13.9%)
  3. ipodnano 13228 (13.0%) / #3 9110 (12.8%)
  4. ipodvideo64mb 12780 (12.5%) / #4 7649 (10.7%)
  5. h300 3614 (3.5%) / #5 3153 (4.4%)
  6. gigabeatf 3522 (3.4%) / #6 3113 (4.4%)
  7. iaudiox5 3340 (3.3%) / #8 2712 (3.8%)
  8. ipodcolor 3287 (3.2%) / #9 2400 (3.4%)
  9. ipodmini2g 3083 (3.0%) / #10 2286 (3.2%)
  10. h120 2924 (2.9%) / #7 2720 (3.8%)
  11. ipod4gray 2896 (2.8%) / #11 2098 (2.9%)
  12. sansac200 2841 (2.8%) / NEW!
  13. ipodmini1g 1647 (1.6%) / #14 1191 (1.7%)
  14. ipod3g 1624 (1.6%) / #15 984 (1.4%)
  15. h10 1624 (1.6%) / #13 1322 (1.9%)
  16. h10_5gb 1524 (1.5%) / #12 1380 (1.9%)
  17. ipod1g2g 1384 (1.4%) / #17 606 (0.9%)
  18. player 834 (0.8%) / #18 551 (0.8%)
  19. recorder 692 (0.7%) / #16 615 (0.9%)
  20. iaudiom5 422 (0.4%) / #19 341 (0.5%)
  21. recorder8mb 354 (0.3%) / #21 256 (0.4%)
  22. h100 345 (0.3%) / #20 299 (0.4%)
  23. recorderv2 222 (0.2%) / #22 227 (0.3%)
  24. fmrecorder 222 (0.2%) / #23 207 (0.3%)
  25. ondiofm 113 (0.1%) / #24 105 (0.1%)
  26. ondiosp 96 (0.1%) / #25 101 (0.1%)

As you can see, the recorderv2 and ondiosp packages are the only ones downloaded less than before. Sansa e200 has taken a big bite of the share since last, and the newcomer c200 gets almost 3% at once. The h120 build dropped 3 steps.

The top-4 targets are portalplayer based. The top-8 targets have color displays.

The downloads split on main architecture is interesting (the previous count to the right of the slashes):

  1. portalplayer 85427 downloads (83.6%) / 56764 (79.7%)
  2. coldfire 10645 downloads (10.4%) / 9225 (12.9%)
  3. samsung 3522 downloads (3.4%) / 3113 (4.3%)
  4. sh1 2533 downloads (2.5%) / 2062 (2.8%)

So while all gained downloads by number, the portalplayer targets increased their share…

Another split on properties is to separate the targets on solid state (flash) memory and hard drives:

  1. HDD 67061 downloads 65.7%
  2. flash 35066 downloads 34.5%

Like last time, this doesn’t include custom builds, builds from download.rockbox.org nor release builds from www.rockbox.org. Take all this as indications, not absolute facts.

Rockbox

Sansa View is PP+mi4 based

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Sansa View I was just told about it by zivan56, and my mi4 page was just updated: the SanDisk Sansa View uses the mi4 file format and it is clearly PortalPlayer based. mi4code can find the crypto key, so decrypting it for disassembly is easy.

In fact, the zip contains two mi4 files and the second one is called “mediaproc.mi4” seems to be for a separate processor or similar, and it makes sense since the PP can’t do the movie playback etc with the specs that they boast for this player.

That media processor might very well be a “nv6110“, referred to many times in the firmware image.

Go crazy in the Rockbox forum thread about it!

cURL and libcurl

libcurl DNS resolve problems on Leopard

libcurlI found this article by Jungle Dave titled Leopard DNS Issues (and work-around), which explains how libcurl built with IPv6 support may cause trouble on MacOS X 10.5 (Leopard).

According to him, that’s because getaddrinfo() causes a SRV lookup to be made and that may be either slow or get discarded completely and thus cause trouble.

This just adds another problem to getaddrinfo() resolves then, since we already have the problem with it when resolving round-robin DNSes since more or less every machine has a bad /etc/gai.conf setup that makes getaddrinfo() return a sorted list instead of the “random” one DNS admins in the wild would prefer the users to use…

Electronics

WQUXGA really

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LCD monitorI know this is a dear subject for many people but I feel I just have to spell it out after having read this engadget notice about Toshiba’s new 3840 x 2400 22″ LCD screen. They call this a WQUSGA resolution!

Man, can they please stop the silly WQZUXZQGA names for the screen resolutions? I’m a hardcore tech geek myself but I lost track of those weird resolution names a long time ago and I want pure resolution numbers in good old width x height style!

My 1600 x 1200 20″ screen does seem a bit old fashioned in comparison! (and no, I don’t know the name of this resolution either!)

cURL and libcurl

aget compared to curl

As you should know, we maintain this curl comparison table on the curl web site, and it lists a set of free tools and how they compare against curl and each other in various aspects. If you want more features compared or other tools included, please tell. Also if you disagree with any of the facts stated there, just shout!cURL

The other day I got an email asking me to add aget to the table, and since it is a free tool (original BSD licensed) with a similar purpose it would indeed fit.

So I downloaded aget 0.4 and had a go at it.

  1. The “stable” 0.4 version doesn’t build out of the tarball. It does wrong assumptions on “errno” and thus I had to manually poke on 3 source files to make it generate a fine binary! While this error is claimed to be fixed in the “devel” version, the devel version fails to build on compiler errors instead!
  2. My first test was to download aget’s own home page with aget… and it failed. It says the page is 0 bytes and it doesn’t download anything and outputs something about a bad seek 0 bytes!
  3. This really turned me off, but then I thought I should report this back to the guys rather than just blog it… but there’s no email address in the package that seems suitable, and when checking on the site I find a reference to a mailing list but when trying to read the list’s archive it just redirects back to the main page! So blogging it is.
  4. aget 0.4 from 2002, the aget devel version is from June 2004. Development seems to have stopped.
  5. I decided aget isn’t going to be added to the table by me at this time. It’ll have to mature some more first (and given the age of the tarballs I doubt that’ll happen…). I also read through the source code a bit and it really gives the impression of being a young project that hasn’t yet have time to settle since there are numerous of suspicious conclusions and source code doing “funny” things.
Mail

gmail hiccups

gmail is fancy and offers lots of space

gmail is often praised these days by people all over, and yeah it is a neat web app and the amount of disk space they offer for this free service is daunting!gmail logo

I do however have several arguments against using gmail that make me not using it myself for anything that is critical.

gmail blocks zip files

The main and major complaint can be phrased like this:

(reason: 552 5.7.0 Illegal Attachment p9si2809195fkb)

That’s the exact message gmail includes in the reject mail when I try to mail my own account with a zip file attached. The zip file itself is perfectly harmless (and contains source code).

I actually get completely legitimate zip files from people every now and then, perhaps even once per week or so and having it reject these mails without even properly explaining why to the user is quite a show-stopper!

gmail spam filter is inferior

The other issue I have with gmail is its annoying spam filter. This too is often claimed to be one of the better things with gmail, and given that they have millions of users and can do pretty detailed statistics on received mails they do have the opportunity to make a decent filter.

But, given that the spam filter is one huge you-have-no-choice-but-our-way there’s no way for me to alter configs, tweak it for my specific spams or make it better deal with the false positives that it picks. And I’ve had it catch far more false positives than my regular spamassassin filter on my main mail account and then I get probably a thousand times more mail and spam on that account.

Electronics

My Next Digicam

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Sony DSC-W1 5MP Digital cameraMy trusty old Sony DSC-W1 is several years old by now and it does show when I compare my camera with those of my friends – and especially when I compare the resulting images. I’m pondering on getting a new one, but I’m struggling to find one that matches my criterias:

  1. (Ultra-) Compact. I want to be able to bring it with me easily, in a pocket or similar. Otherwise I end up not taking any photos at all… So it shouldn’t be any bigger than my existing really. I also enjoy and mostly do point-and-shoot style photographing.
  2. 3″ LCD. I got one of the first 2.5″ LCD cameras and I loved how the big screen makes photographing and viewing pics on it more fun. I’ve seen some cameras with >2.5″ screens and I think they look awesome.
  3. Image Stabilizer. Clearly (according to reviews) they can make a difference, especially with zoom or in low light conditions.
  4. Good low-light images (at least comparable to the excellent Fujifilm Finepix F31fd). It seems even the more recent Fujifilms has went downhill in that department, based on reviews I’ve read.
  5. I think I would prefer a camera that accepts SDHC cards so that I can go with 4GB or perhaps even 8GB at once, easily and cheaply.

And what contenders are there really? Lots of them, but I’ve found none that even reaches 4 out of 5 in this list! 🙁

Oh, and note that the number of pixels ain’t terribly important as long as they’re at 6+ something megapixels.

Suggestions anyone?

curl, open source and networking